I wonder if anyone use A4 for drum sounds instead of other dedicated devices? Any success story with live usage?
For me 4 tracks are not enough to have a dedicated drum track and mix patterns instead of switching them.
The sound of percussive patches with A4 is simply great!
The kicks that come out of it are often a little weak. That isnât a problem if youâre careful with the levels. When I run stereo out of my AK my kick is usually at 127 volume and the rest are often at like 60 then I just bring up the gain of the whole thing.
Besides that one thing you can get more out there percussion from this than even the RYTM in my opinion. Itâs just ok at bread and butter stuff but itâs better than any electribe for example. Best usage in my opinion is to have some drums and some instrumentation coming from A4 and some from another source. However it is totally possible to make a full track with A4 and you can get some pretty fat kicks from routing the CV back into the audio input and pushing the LFO into the audible range. I made a thread about that not too long ago linking to a tutorial from the old forum. That essentially gives you one limited extra digital track. 
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Personally I find four tracks enough to build drum patterns and to also add in melodic and or bass sounds too. Itâs more a matter of how you do it and what exactly you are willing to sacrifice (or not) for whatever effect you are after. For example, I will dedicate one track primarily to a kick and another to a snare or hihat / cymbal but intermixed between these I will add other sounds, be they synth or drum by using plocks.
I then copy patterns to new destinations and add or take elements away from the copy. All you have to do then is sequence them âliveâ and âperformâ or chain em together and sit back and let the A4 do it for you.
I would presume most people that have an A4 and really understand it do this to fully utilise the power of the machine?
Ok so there are some pretty awesome dedicated âdrum machinesâ out there but I think itâs incredible what you can get out of the A4. Four tracks of 64 steps plocked is a crazy amount of information - imo, more than enough to build both simple and insanely complex drum patterns 
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Bandersong, hey, care to drop a link to this cv-to-input thing?
Hereâs the original Elektron Users thread:
In case you donât understand:
Basically, just take a cable from a CV out and put it back into the input.
Make that CV be a Lin Value.
Have an LFO modulate that value and set it to 2k or 1k. The pitch is determined by the speed of the LFO. You can use envelope to shape the LFO or you can use the FADE parameter on the LFO to get it to not be infinite or whatever. Remember to make it activate on Trigger. Play around with the settings.
For a standard kick a SINE wave plus a noise wave modulating the linear value will get you most of the way. Have the noise wave basically provide the click and get the sine wave to be as long as you want the kick to be. For more complex shapes of kicks like long decay you are going to need to use envelopes.
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Agree.
People need to realize that the difference between a snare and a hat is often just the filter and the envelope. This can be plocked easily.
Evolving IDM style percussion is so easy on this machine as to be a joke. Just twidle knobs at random on a snare pattern and youâll get some pretty crazy percussions.
Kicks can be modulated into many shapes to get your low end to be unique.
I dunno theres so much, never really felt limited on this machine
I think the A4 is great for drums and percussion, especially when used with a multi map.
I often set my A4 up to be played with my DrumKat, which has 10 pads. By using multi map you can assign 1 sound per note over the whole MIDI range (0-127). Set your kit polyphony to 2 or 3 and you get a very full kit with little voice stealing. This still leaves 1 to 2 internal tracks to sequence, plus the CV/gate tracks.
But even without drum pads, using multi map really lets you maximize the usage of your A4 as a drum synth.
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Bandersong, thank you, this is a treat, appreciate the example as well! Cheers)
No problem.
I think every A4 user should know about this, I mean most of us are not using all 4 CV outs anyways. It adds a lot to the machine in my opinion
Very interesting thoughts in this threadâŚ
Banderson - does that mean the kick /CV track would be on the CV track and youâd still have the 4 other normal tracks?
Yes.
If you had CV gear you could still sequence them too using the FX track.
Yes.
If you had CV gear you could still sequence them too using the FX track. [/quote]
wow bandersongâŚThanks! this is pretty bonkers / sequencing via the FX track is beyond me right now as I donât have any CV gear to try this out but I just cabled the CV outs to audio ins and experimented a bit with getting a kick on the CV track and itâs fat as hell.
I wanted a stereo signal so I outputted CV A to left audio in and CV C to the right, screwed around with the LFO settings and wave shapes and got some wacky kick shit going on.
Itâs quite noisy and itâs strange hearing it with FX - I also got a mad ducking sound going too. No idea if I can replicate anything I just did but I will definitely experiment with it more to try and work out whatâs going on.
Would you be interested in posting something more instructional on how this is set up - even though I read your original post about this I still had to fudge around alot to figure out how to get it working⌠or maybe I am just a ditz?
Either way⌠very cool so thankyou!
First of all I got this from the Elektron Users guide 
thank that guy.
Anyways
MOST BASIC DIGITAL KICK
CV A SETTINGS FUNC+CV A
LFO 1 Settings
LFO 2 Settings
LFO DESTINATION
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The A4 is THE analogue drum machine for the creative sound designer who wants to stamp their own personality on its sound âŚa toss up between that and the Tempest but, for me, choosing the A4 is a no-brainer, though some may choose the Tempest to have more outputs.
Unless you need more than four sounds hitting simultaneously the track count isnât a problem thanks to sound locks and parameter locks.
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iâve been using A4 including drum sounds for some tracks - it works really well. The CV trick sent me on a pretty great trip to discovering how to get a very close 808 kick drum sound - quite possible by using a second lfo to double the wave form frequency of the first lfo for a short time. Iâve even gone as far as using an oscilloscope and a tr808 and tr-8 to experiment and get great results. Of course it sounds different in some situations but its possible to get there. For one track I even used the second cv for a pulse click and then eqâd it - but thats truly âbonkersâ.
There is another cool way - the feedback mode for the oscillator - but then of course you end up losing one of the tracks.
Hihats and snares are also possible and some of the presets are a great place to start.
Yeah - i love it. It is a big challenge and in some ways a bit crazy since its easier to use a sampleâŚbut its so satisfying in the end.
bit more to it than that, (cr8000 schems) and something worth studying
if your chasing drums sounds from synths
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interesting sounds to be had here
akin to the cue feedback on the md UW
thanks all for the great tips!!!
[quote="âclunkyâ"]
bit more to it than that, (cr8000 schems) and something worth studying
if your chasing drums sounds from synths
[/quote]
I meant a little more abstract to that, but you can get HiHat-ish sounds out of snare presets pretty well just using an filter⌠Maybe not drum machine level, but for âCreativeâ drums
I really enjoy the AK for sharp, computery, sync modulated hats.